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I prefer to look at it like this: in the West, we used to have an effective cradle-to-grave UBI for females. In fact, caring for women and children in our culture was so important that we dedicated an adult male to basically every woman in the country, and her offspring. Super important. All of society was organized around this, and it's one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization.

Now we make women work for money, but the total amount paid across all workers is roughly the same. (Wages have been flat for 40 years, mostly because we have twice the "paid" workers—men AND women—but consumption is basically flat.)

It's regressive. Women have ALWAYS "worked" [0], but prior to the financialization of Western culture, that "work" was—as you pointed out—on activities that we can't put a price on, things like:

* building happy homes and families

* proper nutrition, which is extremely time consuming even today

* birthing and raising children (women had universal "time off" to have kids until we put those same women to work making widgets)

* helping out other families in the local community

* building and maintaining community institutions, schools, churches, etc.

* helping others in humane, non-financial ways where there isn't any money to be made

We've given up a lot of these things just to keep wages down for the Capitalists. At least the rising inequality over the last 40 years shows someone benefited. Just not us, or our children, or our communities.

Decline is a choice.

[0] I hate that our culture only values things that can be expressed in terms of money. Calling what women do "work" (or as the OP calls it, uncompensated "labor") is demeaning to women. What women do day-to-day is vastly more important than whatever bullshit men have to (gladly) do to build and maintain civilization for their families.

Can't say I agree completely, actually I'm pretty insulted. People pursue careers for reasons other than pure greed. My sister is a doctor and a professor and has contributed far more to society than I have as man or a father.

I do agree that we don't need two people per household doing bullshit jobs like selling advertising.

But civilization is perfectly capable of decline and disaster even if we were still organized around single income households. So what if out our children have good nutrition, if we are faced with total environmental collapse or nuclear war?

Pining for the old days is easy when you don't have a clear picture of them.

It's disingenuous to call domestic servitude "caring for" or "UBI", by the same metric prison is UBI for prisoners.

If you want cooking, cleaning, and childcare so badly, why don't you volunteer to do it instead of telling women it's our place. I think I'll take my job over being a man's property.

I personally would love to be the property of most of the women I've dated in my life.

I help watch my nieces and nephews when needed already anyway, I'm very stubborn about keeping my living space organized and sanitized(in fact i cleaned my grandparent's entire house of mold(they are hoarders too so it involved tons of lifting/reoganizing)), and I've been into fitness/athletics my whole life, which entails learning to cook healthy meals.

If a women were to ask me to come do any of those things for her I would head right over enthusiastically and I don't expect anything in return either as long as she kept me company. This applies regardless of whether I'm romantically interested in her.

The problem here is that your job is then defined at your birth based on the genitalia with which you're born. That's more or less arbitrary. What if a female is better able to contribute to society as, say, a doctor? What if a male wants to stay home and run a family?

People should have the freedom to choose how they live their lives; they should be able to contribute to society in any way they please.

Suggesting that assigning jobs at birth is superior to our current system is rather silly. Yes, we have new problems to solve by ceasing that behavior, but regressing isn't the solution.

> Now we make women work for money

Or you could say that women choose to work for money. The concept of single earner households can indeed work very well, but it has to be a choice of those involved regardless of gender. There are other possible arrangements, too: more communal living, part-time work, inter-generational arrangements, for example. And a true UBI.

> In fact, caring for women and children in our culture was so important that we dedicated an adult male to basically every woman in the country, and her offspring.

That is, at least to me, a very interesting way to describe a patriarchy that was backed only by bible interpretations for centuries.

EDIT: "interesting" should be pronounced with a strong, British accent.

The problem is density. The hawker stalls in Singapore are exactly this (pojangmachas and cafeteria dealios in Seoul, hawkers in Hong Kong), but they get to have it and your suburb doesn't because they have enough soulless 50 story apartments. Ask for a 50 story soulless concrete apartment in your neighborhood today!

It's a very logical connection: low density housing leads to low density commerce and transportation problems. See also: strip malls.

There’s nothing soulless about high density, it’s efficient, environmentally friendly and to your point allows and supports diversity in recreation and dining. It’s the inescapable future of human civilization, in a good way. Would you describe living in New York as soulless? It’s time to get over the dog/white picket fence/2.5 kids delusion.

Soulless 50 story apartments are better than soulless cookie cutter detached homes, because at least with the former it‘s easier to escape total isolation. And of course it is better for the environment.

Neither option is humane. In both cases, the capitalist illness has destroyed any sense of community.

Nobody in big cities knows their neighbors. And very few people organize against poverty, against their bosses, landlords, and police abuse. They could have a good life if they did, but don't underestimate the capacity of an oppressive system to isolate people (because it's the only way it can survive).

I mean, the former Warsaw Pact states are also full of lots of "soulless" dense housing, just Communist-flavored.

You can have lots of housing, cheap housing, and quality housing, but never really all three. Vienna, which a lot of people like bringing up as an example of a friendly masss housing program, recorded flat or declining population every decade until 2000, and has still not recovered from its pre-WWI peak, which wasn't even very big at 2M people.

High density housing works in S'pore just because it's S'pore.

People respect the rules (otherwise they face consequences for asocial behaviour) and this makes the city function like a well oiled machine.

The same scheme wouldn't work in many Western cities, too many self-absorbed people thinking they're more important than their community.

It does work in the West you just need to enforce the rules. There are Western countries that do this well and there are ones that fail at enforcing these rules.

This is why I didn't write "all". I saw it working in Switzerland myself.

> too many self-absorbed people thinking they're more important than their community.

If people in Singapore are more community minded, then why the need for the harsh enforcement? (You know, public whippings for putting your shoes on the wrong feet or whatever...)

> I live in the suburbs and I have to really, really, think. If I want something that isn't deep fried, isn't a burger, or a salad with 'BS' leafs (but is actually a salad with strong content and non-filler material): I struggle to think of even one place, let alone a selection that I could drive to within the local zone. Let alone anything I could hope to walk to in a reasonable duration of time.

Start checking out your local grocery stores. In addition to selling, well, groceries, most of them will have a deli section and a salad bar. Salad bars in grocery stores typically get charged by the pound, so you can pick and choose exactly what you're getting. Most grocery stores in the US will also have already-cooked rotisserie chickens, sides available by weight, and other precooked options. Most large grocery stores in the US basically have a fully stocked cafeteria in them.

I have checked the stores I already shop at, none has a salad bar. Are you sure that's not an in the (dense) city thing?

It is a big supermarket thing moreso than a city thing. It’s a big part of the Whole Foods strategy, and an increasing part of Safeway/Ralph’s/etc. They have an increasing amount of hot food that you can take away. Walmart in the “country” didn’t, I don’t know if that’s a Walmart thing or a country thing (they did have a subway in-store).

Yeah, large supermarkets tend to have salad bars, suburban or urban. Wal-Mart has grocery items, but you're not going to find a salad bar at one. Same goes for Target. You're also not going to find a salad bar at a Trader Joe's or an Aldi's.

But your typical large-format grocery store will have one. It's hard to talk chains and be comprehensive because American supermarket chains are not national. But whatever your market's equivalent of Wegmans/Publix/Kroger/HEB/Meijer/Albertsons/Hy-Vee should have one.

There are, it should be noted, places in the US where there are not readily-available supermarkets. But those tend to be urban and rural, not suburban:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Ok, here's what you do.

Buy a bottle of olive oil and a bottle of vinegar (a fancy vinegar if you want, apple cider or balsamic, but not malt) then buy a packet of Italian spices (typically a blend of oregano, thyme, etc...)

Buy some salad greens, either a head of lettuce, or a box of spring mix or similar blend of greens.

To make salad dressing mix two parts oil to one part vinegar, put in a pinch of Italian spices, a pinch of salt, whisk.

Then pour over your greens, add some feta cheese olives and baby tomatoes, capers if you want.

When I'm in the mood for a good self built salad I go to the hospital cafeteria near me. They charge by weight and have a large selection. I find most hospitals are the same. Maybe you should check out that option.

Plenty of nicer resturants have fast lunch menus. The problem is that people take the growing, nutrition and preperation of food for granted.

>In the old days, long before I was born, about 50% of the population was conscripted as "free" labor

That could be anywhere up until 2019 or later.

As long as you consider surviving and having your children supported financially to be worthless, yes, the labor was free.

"free" in this case meaning uncompensated, not worthless.

I didn't say their labor was worthless.

But free definitely implies they did in exchange for nothing, which is false.

That's why there were the airquotes. Not-paid, and not priced in to the actual compensation of others directly. It was simply assumed that this was the way things were. (IIRC the legal terms also made the union a single person in a lot of respects.)

And if I say men died for their families in war or in the struggle to make a living and did it for "free", that also would be a vast oversimplification and a distortion of the situation.

Enlisted military men (and women) get paid, at least in the US.

Yeah, I think if you are forced to do something and not paid a mutually agreed upon wage, and then you die, you are not getting monetary compensation for that sacrifice.

But you may gladly go along with all of it, even the risk of death, because of what you care about. Your family, your town, your country.

Which is why claiming the work of either men or women is done for free is silly. There are so many other values in life.

No, that's not what free means. In this context, free means women are not getting economic retribution for domestic work (even nowadays).

https://www.workingnowandthen.com/scholarstudent/reviews/sil...